13 ms·

RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

mcguire 6y ago
Back when I was a sysadmin at a university CS department, we always picked namespaces for machines---everything in a given namespace had related names and were identical (or nearly identical) machines. If someone mentioned toque or glenfiddich, you could tell what lab they were in and what kind of machine they were. I always wanted to use 'Starships from Iain M. Banks' science fiction', which is why no one ever listened to me. For personal machines, I have been using adjectives that start with 'i'.
- vermilingua 6y ago
  I’ve been using Culture ship names for my personal machines for nearly as long as I’ve been naming machines. Wikipedia’s decision to delete the list was utterly ridiculous, thankfully they all made it over to the fandom wiki. Unfortunately they’re now a finite resource, RIP.
utf8 6y ago
Some good suggestions to name Apple devices so that the life is easier when looking at Find My.
mrlonglong 6y ago
At a previous employer many moons ago we had three SunOS servers named Shooty and Bangbang after these two clueless coppers in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. The third was named tartsdrawers as it was up and down all the time. Good memories.
sellyme 6y ago
Sometimes when reading documents from the infancy of the internet it's difficult to get a sense for the online environment at the time it was written. For this one that difficulty disappeared very quickly once I got to the section where the existence of a computer in Tahiti was indeterminate.
cogburnd02 6y ago
Sci-hub has the pdf of the original in Comm. of the ACM under the DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/68814.316006 https://doi.org/10.1145/68814.316006 Has a nice Far Side too.
chunkyks 6y ago
The biggest mistake I've made, once myself, and once inheriting a network someone else passed on to me: Picking a theme that's too small. I inherited a couple servers "jules" and "vincent" [after the Pulp Fiction characters]. I added mia and ringo, I started finding remaining names weren't great. Butch is a bit homoerotic. "zed" is one I've used, but I can't wait for the day someone without a sense of humor figures that out. I've also used "chopper" now. "Marsellus" is too hard to spell. "watch" is next on my list, but that's really dredging the bottom of the barrel. The other network, we used Scooby Doo characters because there was no way that room would ever have more than five systems... of course the next tranche of added systems had to go with a totally different theme. So the room now has the mystery machine occupants, and ... dragons from how to train your dragon.
shaftway 6y ago
Periodic table entries here. Lots of ways to divide that space, but generally for me laptops were lighter elements, desktops heavier, and servers the heaviest. Virtual machines were all heavily radioactive elements (e.g. Uranium and Plutonim). Can't remember what I used the noble elements for. Now I don't bother and just select the default. Or name it after where it's going to be, or what it's going to do, or when I got it. If I'm going to repurpose or move it I'll probably just reimage it anyway. The wifi is still named "Periodic" though and it still uses a chemical makeup as the password (e.g. c3h5n3o9).
BlueTemplar 6y ago
> ("earth" is not yet a domain name.) It is now !
BlueTemplar 6y ago
> don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names. Like "git" ? ^^
kuter 6y ago
I was expecting this to be a April Fools RFC [0]. I was disappointed when I checked the date. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...
- DanBC 6y ago
  One of the nicest "hidden" RFCs is RFC2468. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468 ("2 4 6 8, who do we appreciate")
- TickleSteve 6y ago
  Also "IP over avian carriers" (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149) (IP via pigeons).
  - kuter 6y ago
    Frame Format The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed. Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    In 2009 someone found that a pigeon was faster at transferring data than their ISP: * https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-data-faster-than-the-internet/ https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-d... * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm * https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11325452 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11325452
- modderation 6y ago
emersion 6y ago
Use anime character names. That way you have an excuse to collect cute artwork for these machines.
- netflixandkill 6y ago
  It's easy to be nostalgic for the days of big iron servers or clusters that were around for years as a sort of network landmarks. We used to have dev and QA clusters named after movie monsters and you'd get some great hallway conversations about who was using Godzilla that week. Made for great mascot toys and posters on the rack doors.
  - wazoox 6y ago
    A server can be around for years and years why being different. For instance my main debian package server has been "basson" since 2003. In 2003 it was a large, old SGI server; later on it became a 1U rack server, that was replaced a couple of times; nowadays it's a VM. But the internal sources.list still points to "basson" :) (My machines all have musical instrument names).
- jjice 6y ago
  That's a great scheme. I hope that one day amongst the university computer labs named for Greek/Roman mythology or rock artists, we have a lab of anime characters. At least at my uni, I think a lot of people would get a kick out of that.
walrus01 6y ago
Based on the long response time, I think we've hugged the IETF httpd to death which is somewhat funny considering who runs it.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
We had to solve this problem for our TPU management system: https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus The most sensible naming scheme for us was to distinguish them by index. But there were two important differences: TPUs have many sizes, which means some are larger than others; if you're using a v3-256, you're very likely the only researcher doing so. They are also distinguished by type; v3 is more powerful than v2. Finally, they are region-based; the less powerful v2's are in the US, whereas the v3 fleet is mainly EU based. That led to the convention of tpu-v3-8-euw4a-1, tpu-v2-256-usc1a-0, and so on. The "tpu-" prefix might seem redundant, but I find it's helpful in conversation. That's a personal preference though, and if I had to do it again I'd probably drop the tpu- prefix entirely. I found this scheme was horrible for VMs though. TPUs are often used for specific training runs, and the scheme above is easily added to bash files / config scripts. But for VMs, you're often SSH'ing into them all the time. Ultimately we started naming the VMs after the researchers who originally needed them. Our current primary training box is song.tensorfork.com, named after researcher songpeng who it was created for. So the SSH scheme was pleasant: song@song.tensorfork.com for him, shawn@song.tnesorfork.com for me, arfa@, aydao@, etc. When arfa neded a VM, I simply named it arfa. All other more complicated naming schemes failed with time. No one (including me) could remember long VM names, let alone ones with numbers in them. The other scheme that persisted was to use anime characters, as emersion mentioned. Tensorfork itself runs off of vegeta, which is my personal Hetzner server. "goku" was one of our primary workhorses at one point, due to its large VM size. Our final two VMs are named "test" and "nuck", which also seem to work quite well (much to my surprise). "Is test down?" is almost completely unambiguous. And it's easy to remember which one is which: "nuck" is in Canada, so therefore "test" is the one in europe. A pattern emerges here: most of our VM names are short, four-letter identifiers: arfa, song, test, nuck, goku, with vegeta being the standout. All other conventions failed with time.
ddtaylor 6y ago
Kind of weird when it lists names of killers as a theme name...
- sellyme 6y ago
  That might cause some problems if you run out of candidates and the sysadmin is trying to come up with an easy solution...
KineticLensman 6y ago
> Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs. When you order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will probably get more next year. We ran into this years ago when we named our machines after the Marx Brothers. We started out with Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. When two more arrived, we used Chico and Gummo. IIRC we added Karl, Deutsche, Skid, Birth and Spencer before giving in and adopting a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't covered by TFA).
- yorwba 6y ago
  > a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't covered by TFA). It is: ... Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Remember that this was written in 1990. Kubernetes wasn't around back then.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Computer names are like function names. The edge of your system needs good names. The ones in the middle can quite happily be anonymous / referred to only by their address.
mrweasel 6y ago
This kind of naming is fine for small projects, and personal setups. In professional settings I would suggest using descriptive names and rely more on DNS. It's not that I don't enjoy fun and personal naming schemes, it's just that it's a constant annoyance when dealing with a large number of different systems. We've been hired to deal with different companies, who picks some random naming, cars, athletes, plants, cities and so on and it's confusing as hell. How am I suppose to remember that Ford and Volvo are your two web servers? Now I need to maintain a list mappings for your servers and look them up every time I need to change your web configuration. Just call them prod-web01.company.com and prod-web02.company.com, it's fine and everyone will be able to guess what those servers do. You can also do web01.prod.company.com and web01.test.company.com, but while it looks cleaner (and I personally prefer it) is does hide the "prod" or "test" in most shells, so you constantly need to check that you're not messing with a production box.
- p_l 6y ago
  Functional names for servers are IMHO one of the worst possible options, because functions drift over time. Have individual hw named in unique way that isn't related to functionality it runs, then use CNAMEs specific to functionality - i.e. never point a DNS client at "freddy.dc.somecorp.com", you point it at "dns01.dc.somecorp.com". The decision on what machines need unique names, not just pseudorandom IDs or similar crap, is well described by another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054487 - which I like to put as "named systems are the systems you care about" In fact, I'll go with seemingly unpopular opinion that there are only pets, never cattle. The pets just happen to have components, but at some level of the stack you're hitting a precious pet. Even if said pet is "us-east-1 Lambda service"
  - anarcat 6y ago
    I used to name physical servers like pets (greek gods or whatever) and virtuals like cattle (function), with the idea that, yes, function of physical machines can change over time... But the problem with that logic is that the name is not only attached to the metal, it's set (and mostly so, I'd argue) in software, as the OS hostname. And then what happens next is that the motherboard of that precious pet melts down and you scramble to move those drives to a spare, and now you have two metals with the same name. It just doesn't work so well. And your fancy random or pseudorandom looking naming scheme is cool and fun until someone new comes in and asks you wtf colchicifolium is... Name machines on purpose. If the purpose changes, the OS will likely follow as well. If not, renaming shouldn't be that big of a deal, or, to put it another way: if you can't rename, you can't reinstall, and then you'll fail. Now naming hardware is the "fun" part. when is the last time you did an inventory of your motherboards? or is it disks we're naming? the raid array or individual ones? how about memory sticks? or do you only name precious server cases? ;) after all, that is where the label ends up...
rbanffy 6y ago
Shameless plug: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname It probably needs updating. It's been a while since the last large leak.
cy6erlion 6y ago
Shameless plug, CLI for reading IETF RFCs. https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf You will read this RFC like this: $ ietf -n 1178
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  why not just $ ietf 1178 ?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- majewsky 6y ago
  Alternative method for Arch Linux: Install the `rfc` package, then find the RFC at /usr/share/doc/rfc/txt/rfc1178.txt. A very nice package to have installed when travelling far from an internet connection.
  - throwaway525142 6y ago
    That unfortunately has an installed size of 500MiB.
    - KMnO4 6y ago
      Perhaps a problem two decades ago but is that really an issue now?
pvinis 6y ago
I've had a nice scheme for naming my devices for a while. I have a list of my devices here, with explanations. https://pvin.is/post/my-device-naming-scheme https://pvin.is/post/my-device-naming-scheme
acomjean 6y ago
Like a lot of things, people can remember names of things better than numbers. Genes for example, it’s easier to remember their names lz, wnt, than their associated gene Id number. But like stars and many other things there are too many to give each a unique name. Naming can make sense, our old cluster was named after orchestra parts. When you logged In you where placed on the lobby. The machines where clustered (violin01, violin02, tuba01) and grouped by function types (percussion were the web servers) New cluster it’s login01,login02 , the work cluster names I don’t remember...
- Macha 6y ago
  Why is percussion01 better than web01?
  - michaelmcdonald 6y ago
    I'm assuming (based on reading how they performed grouping) that percussion01 didn't exist, but perhaps cymbal01 did (since a cymbal is a type of percussion instrument). Therefore cymbal01 would be a web server of sometime. The benefit to naming it this way is you could have multiple types of web servers (internal, dev, prod) and by using a more generic name you could more easily change the function of that web server (so cymbal servers could be dev, then move to prod, without needing a name change).
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      My feeling, though, is that you care more about the function of a machine than the physical machine itself. Why not change the machine name when you change it’s purpose? There is no reason you need to know that the current prod web server used to be the dev server.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  On the other hand, I really hate code names for software versions... I can never remember which name is which version. I wish everyone would just say “16.04” and “18.04”, that makes it really obvious which version cam before the other one.
curtis3389 6y ago
I use the wordlist from Oren Tirosh’s mnemonic encoding project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com/mnemonic/wordlist.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com... I can't find the post that linked it, but it had a very nice scheme. EDIT: found it: https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ EDIT2: one-liner to get a random word from the file: cat wordlist.txt | tail -n +2 | sed -E 's/\s*(\w+)\s+/\1\n/g' | sed -E '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1 i.e. <print file> | <skip first line> | <split lines into words> | <remove empty lines> | <choose random line>
- anarcat 6y ago
  I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer. Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then the host is named after that (e.g. we use Ganeti, so gnt-01, or say kube-01). At home, I name machines after inspiring political figures and while I like the naming, it does discourage me into treating those machines as cattle, which I should do more.
  - anarcat 6y ago
    oh and forgot to mention.. at my current job, there was this practice of naming servers after onions (I'll let you guess where that is). I had no idea how many kinds of onions there were turns out there are many, especially if you start to take in Latin names and translations... But then I need to learn how to spell colchicifolium, and neriniflorum, and no, those two are not related (or are they) and what does meronense do again? and oh yeah corsicum is the replica of one of those... Those naming conventions are cool until you start to document your stuff properly and start being serious about training and including new people. Then you should focus on meaningful, easy to remember, type, and generate, names.
  - curtis3389 6y ago
    I prefer to have mostly meaningless names for machines, and then having more names for them in DNS for their various functions. That way the functions can be moved about the machines and if that's what you care about, then that's how you refer to them (deploy the app Foobar to web01 and web02), but when a machine goes down, you can shout, "clark is down!" web01/dns01/sto01 being down only means the service is down, whereas clark being down is something more severe. I manage my stuff with Ansible, which makes all this pretty easy.
thom 6y ago
For personal stuff (and even early machines for some companies which blurred the lines) I always chose the names of forests in the Magic: the Gathering multiverse. I try and help keep this page updated purely for that purpose: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Forest https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Forest These days, for work, it’s just boring unambiguous stuff. I think with more cloud infrastructure and the rarity of shared unix servers with home directories for people, it’s rare that I have any emotional investment in a machine. They’re basically soulless now.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  To date, Dryad Arbor is still one of the coolest cards in MtG, simply because of both the simplicity and the universality of its quote. When it came out, I was very surprised by the idea that a land could also be a creature. These days we have way wonkier mechanics, but that novelty along with the quote has a special place in my heart.
  - thom 6y ago
    Yeah I’m always really sad it doesn’t make it into the MTGO cube.
    - bobbyi_settv 6y ago
      An opponent being able to remove one of your lands with small creature removal or any ping effect or -1/-1 counter is scary. It sees play (I think) in Legacy and Commander where there are a bunch of specific powerful ways to abuse it (e.g., combo off early with Arbor + Gaea's Cradle to generate a bunch of mana), but you're not going to pull that off often in cube, so it would mostly be a basic forest that your opponent can easily remove.
einpoklum 6y ago
Brief summary of the RFC (to save you the read): * Don't overload other terms already in common use. * Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. * Don't use your own name. * Don't use long names. * Avoid alternate spellings. * Avoid domain names. * Avoid domain-like names. * Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names. * Don't use digits at the beginning of the name. * Don't use non-alphanumeric characters in a name. * Don't expect case to be preserved. * Use words/names that are rarely used. * Use theme names. * Use real words. * Don't worry about reusing someone else's hostname. * There is always room for an exception.
jjice 6y ago
For personal machines I use fiction locations from media I enjoy. My laptop is Hyrule, my desktop is Konoha, and my Pi is MotherBase, but I spell mine all lowercase. For servers I use for my roommates and I (Jellyfin and the like), we name them after the quirky students that go to our university that we appreciate.
rphln 6y ago
The naming scheme I settled on for my devices was using ship names from World War 2. - Device size and computing power maps roughly to the ship size: my desktop is named after a battleship, while my Kindle is named after a destroyer. - Servers are always named after carriers. It just made sense to me somehow. - Like the warships, the names can eventually get reused as the devices are replaced.
dls2016 6y ago
I use Simpsons character names for VMs: FatTony, SexyFlanders, Krustofsky... never ending supply of names.
- hlehmann 6y ago
  I've also always used Simpsons characters for my home machines. So far I've gone through itchy, scratchy, krusty, blinky, moe, and edna.
indentit 6y ago
> Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name. That's a good point, but humans are very different to computers - machines (be they physical or virtual) are provisioned for a specific purpose (even if that is to be "Fred's PC"), whereas humans need time to grow and can decide for themselves what to do as a career / what their hobbies will be, and change it any time. But realistically, yes, the RFC is right that you may end up with machines whose purpose changes or multiple machines have the same purpose etc. But when they don't, it is much easier to have meaningful names. If you will name them differently, then please make sure all developers can access the list/mapping document and it is kept updated. It's frustrating if you want to investigate some production problems but end up looking at the wrong server's logs because devops didn't tell anyone they moved an application /website etc. I like someone else's comment about app01 being easier to reason about and recreate than something named more specifically, and in the modern world, its easy to spin up a new docker instance or VM so there's less need to "let's just add this small service on that machine because it has spare capacity" (where capacity could be CPU/RAM etc.)
mercora 6y ago
for virtual machines i tend to use names that belong to some other entity and call the hypervisor after that. for example Saturn and its moons, Africa and its countries or some authors and their works.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Or your robot vacuum cleaner! My nieces have various names - Oni, Bob. Ours is named Puck.
tyingq 6y ago
Resource tags, like the ones supported by Vmware, AWS, and other cloud providers would be more important to me than a server name. I suppose for old-school bare-metal on-prem, you could put tags in DNS TXT records and some database.
intrasight 6y ago
I am fondly recollecting my time as an undergraduate at CMU in the 80s. All the machines were named from cities and towns in Pennsylvania. Old-school bare-metal on-prem indeed. That time has largely passed as machines are ephemeral. Functional names make more sense now.
bombcar 6y ago
Given that it seems you don’t upgrade Linux Instalaciones between major revisions - I use short names that are unique in the first character or two and code the os/version. Sure it doesn’t scale much but I don’t have many servers and ssh u<tab> gets me where I need to be.
IgorPartola 6y ago
I use Harry Potter character names. There were hundreds of the mentioned off hand in the books, so I usually use obscure ones. They have the benefit of being easy to pronounce and spell: Mafalda Hopkirk, Silvanus Kettleburn, Irma Pince, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_charact...
- RegW 6y ago
  All devices in our house are creatures: griphook, fawkes, crookshanks, pigwidgeon, hedwig, aragog, firenze, grawp, etc.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Nice! I usually do creatures for more appliance-type devices and wizards for servers. But it is somewhat of an arbitrary division.
moonbug 6y ago
what's tomorrow, a thread on last night's dreams? No one cares how you name your computers.
- ylor 6y ago
  I care. I have my own silly naming convention and I like hearing about other's. It's a fun topic.
jlgaddis 6y ago
At the risk of showing my age... In my own private home lab -- which has grown way too large -- I like using names of the Garbage Pail Kids [0] as hostnames. There's a few benefits to this naming scheme, when dealing with physical machines at least: 1) you can usually find a name that suits the "temperament" of the particular host and 2) you can tape the trading card to the host (or the rack, next to it) to make finding / identifying it easier. -- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids
Nvorzula 6y ago
Some time ago I got into the habit of naming my home network after Pokemon that I happen to thought fit well. My Windows desktop is Charizard and it's Ubuntu dual boot is DarkCharizard. My fileserver/Docker box is Metagross. My wireless SSID is Raichu, my laptop is Pikachu, and my phone is Pichu. And so on.
shagie 6y ago
One company that I worked at... while the hardware people had their boring "r17s4ad" type name (rack 17, shelf 4, application, development), our team used the naming scheme of Caribbean islands. This worked rather well. Unfortunately, I only remember the test and production server names. The test systems were "Trinidad" and "Tobago". The production systems where "Nevis" and "Nassau" (the app started with an 'N'). The thing that made this work really well was that the first syllable hinted on what the rest of the word would be and then everything beyond that reinforced that you read it right. This even was the case that foreign accents, while slightly off still reinforced the "you heard this right". The machines _also_ had names of "test01" and "test02" or similar... but we (as devs) never used those names because you had to listen to the end of it to be sure that you had the right machines.
krallja 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_fig... has been good for naming my workstations for decades. Dual-boot scenaria can use Roman/Greek names for the Mac/Windows or Win/Linux “personalities” of the same physical machine.
- rgj 6y ago
  I once almost got fired because my computer was called aphrodite, the CTO had to demo my webapp, and he couldn’t spell it correctly.
lamontcg 6y ago
Over 5 years at working at Amazon (quite some time ago, I don't know what they do now) and we happily violated "no domain names" without any issue for linux servers. If you don't have linux boxes that span different networks it doesn't cause a problem to have server have one single domain name and have the hostname be the same. Linux boxes aren't proper security devices or router so don't use them as that and don't mutihome them. The routers and switches were given short names. These RFCs simply don't capture that there are rules you can adopt (and if you're big enough -- which is not terribly big) then you can discard some of these suggestions completely. There is not a one-size-fits-all. I ignored this RFC's suggestion at a fairly massive scale for 5 years and never had an issue. Also don't fall into the trap of just assigning random serial numbers to servers. I later worked somewhere that did this and it makes it difficult to communicate about the servers in the middle of outages. I've had communication issues where I've been talking to another engineer and I was using the first hex digits of the server name and they were using the last as shortcuts and we thought we were logged into different servers and it was the same one. You hardly ever want humans dealing with your server names, but when humans do need to use your server names it is one of the times that really matter because shit is on fire. Group them by single purpose of what the cluster does with some kind of incrementing number. The idea to use theme names and not "project" names is also deeply 100% wrong. When you have 100,000s of servers you run out of theme names and you'll fail to remember the name schemes in the middle of an outage. Name them after what the servers do, and keep them more or less reflecting their purpose. Consider carefully some kind of numbering scheme to keep the short names unique across datacenters so you don't have a dozen foo-101 servers. You may want to use incrementing serial numbers for both datacenters and cluster members or something so "foo-1-101" and number your datacenters (or logical cluster number if you're really big and stamp them out 30,000 at a time or something). Oh right this is the RFC from 1990. Yeah, shit has changed, this RFC needs to evolve. Back in 1990 when this was written a single system admin hand managing 20-30 servers was a lot. Web didn't exist. I can't recall any kind of load balancing or much clustering. You might have SunOS boxes running RIP doing routing across internal subnets that were 10baseT. NAT and firewalls weren't used much at all and servers would just sit on public IPs. This RFC is prehistoric.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
rgj 6y ago
Best naming scheme I ever saw was at Harbinger in the late nineties. They used the periodic system. The last octet of the IP address corresponded to the atomic number, and you could use the full element name, or the abbreviation. So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.
- malobre 6y ago
  It's funny it is exactly what I did on my LAN, Hydrogen being my router and so on.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  What was the plan if they needed another subnet?
  - Agenttin 6y ago
    There are only 118 elements. Obviously this is only for small groups of servers.
- koolba 6y ago
  When you split a workload from one to multiple machines, would it have to follow the rules of fission to decide where to run it?
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  > So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera. No wonder helium was mostly hanging ... Sorry, could not resist. It is a clever naming scheme. At one site a client used names from The Three Stooges, then they got the 6th server (exhausting the list of the lead characters).
  - watersb 6y ago
    We had Stooges servers in the 1990s...
dehrmann 6y ago
On thing I've seen work well for corporate networks is use a different domain for infra than for public-facing servers.
hoppla 6y ago
For some reason, when doing a fresh OS install, the hostname step is the bottleneck and takes too long to complete. Distros should really prioritize optimizing this part of the installer!
chewxy 6y ago
I have named my machines after Doctor Who planets for the last 18 ish years. All new machines start as Gallifrey (workstation) or TARDIS (laptop). Then as they stop being my primary devices they get other planet / ship names. The torrenting machine was suitably called Skaro. :p Two exceptions are my PiHole and OctoPi. The old PiHole used to be called TimeLock but when I upgraded I didn't keep the name
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Just reminded me how Sword of the Stars 1 uses a bunch of scifi references for the names of their "neutral" or Human randomly generated stars : http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Sci-fi_References#Star_Names http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Sci-fi_References#Star...
pawelmi 6y ago
Two hardest problems in IT: naming, cache invalidation and off by one.
diftraku 6y ago
A long-time personal favourite naming scheme of mine has been Pokemons (and by extension, Digimons). There's a good selection, it's pretty varied and there's no shortage of em (assuming you don't exceed 100-200 new systems in a 3 year period). This also has an accidental side-benefit of not being tasked to name new hosts at work, unless your really want to call the new database server Stufful, for example. Another thing to keep in mind with more descriptive hostnames like `database`, is to serialize them from the start. It's a very minor thing but after you have three hosts with one of them missing the serialization, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb and it could be a major undertaking on changing that name where it's used. When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned).
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  > When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned). Or, as told by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/910/ https://xkcd.com/910/
hyperrail 6y ago
The weirdest naming scheme for computers I've seen is the one used some years ago by my college: It named Linux workstations after Linux kernel committers' email usernames! There were the better-known folks like linus (Linus Torvalds [1]) and gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman [2]), but also relatively more obscure people, like shemminger (Stephen Hemminger [3]) and stelian (Stelian Pop [4]). I didn't recognize most of those names at the time, but now that I do, I wonder what those people would have thought about having a large organization's computers named after them. A bit creeped out, I would think. [1] https://github.com/torvalds https://github.com/torvalds [2] http://www.kroah.com/log/ http://www.kroah.com/log/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/ [4] https://www.popies.net https://www.popies.net
gbolcer 6y ago
AT UCI, they chose Paris Metro stops. All of them were hard to spell and pronounce, so we always made up shortened aliases.

Back when I was a sysadmin at a university CS department, we always picked namespaces for machines---everything in a given namespace had related names and were identical (or nearly identical) machines. If someone mentioned toque or glenfiddich, you could tell what lab they were in and what kind of machine they were. I always wanted to use 'Starships from Iain M. Banks' science fiction', which is why no one ever listened to me. For personal machines, I have been using adjectives that start with 'i'.

vermilingua 6y ago
I’ve been using Culture ship names for my personal machines for nearly as long as I’ve been naming machines. Wikipedia’s decision to delete the list was utterly ridiculous, thankfully they all made it over to the fandom wiki. Unfortunately they’re now a finite resource, RIP.

utf8 6y ago

Some good suggestions to name Apple devices so that the life is easier when looking at Find My.

mrlonglong 6y ago

At a previous employer many moons ago we had three SunOS servers named Shooty and Bangbang after these two clueless coppers in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. The third was named tartsdrawers as it was up and down all the time. Good memories.

sellyme 6y ago

Sometimes when reading documents from the infancy of the internet it's difficult to get a sense for the online environment at the time it was written. For this one that difficulty disappeared very quickly once I got to the section where the existence of a computer in Tahiti was indeterminate.

cogburnd02 6y ago

Sci-hub has the pdf of the original in Comm. of the ACM under the DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/68814.316006 https://doi.org/10.1145/68814.316006 Has a nice Far Side too.

chunkyks 6y ago

The biggest mistake I've made, once myself, and once inheriting a network someone else passed on to me: Picking a theme that's too small. I inherited a couple servers "jules" and "vincent" [after the Pulp Fiction characters]. I added mia and ringo, I started finding remaining names weren't great. Butch is a bit homoerotic. "zed" is one I've used, but I can't wait for the day someone without a sense of humor figures that out. I've also used "chopper" now. "Marsellus" is too hard to spell. "watch" is next on my list, but that's really dredging the bottom of the barrel. The other network, we used Scooby Doo characters because there was no way that room would ever have more than five systems... of course the next tranche of added systems had to go with a totally different theme. So the room now has the mystery machine occupants, and ... dragons from how to train your dragon.

shaftway 6y ago

Periodic table entries here. Lots of ways to divide that space, but generally for me laptops were lighter elements, desktops heavier, and servers the heaviest. Virtual machines were all heavily radioactive elements (e.g. Uranium and Plutonim). Can't remember what I used the noble elements for. Now I don't bother and just select the default. Or name it after where it's going to be, or what it's going to do, or when I got it. If I'm going to repurpose or move it I'll probably just reimage it anyway. The wifi is still named "Periodic" though and it still uses a chemical makeup as the password (e.g. c3h5n3o9).

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> ("earth" is not yet a domain name.) It is now !

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names. Like "git" ? ^^

kuter 6y ago

I was expecting this to be a April Fools RFC [0]. I was disappointed when I checked the date. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for...

DanBC 6y ago
One of the nicest "hidden" RFCs is RFC2468. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468 ("2 4 6 8, who do we appreciate")
TickleSteve 6y ago
Also "IP over avian carriers" (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149) (IP via pigeons).
- kuter 6y ago
  Frame Format The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff. The scroll of paper is wrapped around one leg of the avian carrier. A band of duct tape is used to secure the datagram's edges. The bandwidth is limited to the leg length. The MTU is variable, and paradoxically, generally increases with increased carrier age. A typical MTU is 256 milligrams. Some datagram padding may be needed. Upon receipt, the duct tape is removed and the paper copy of the datagram is optically scanned into a electronically transmittable form.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  In 2009 someone found that a pigeon was faster at transferring data than their ISP: * https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-data-faster-than-the-internet/ https://www.wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pigeon-transfers-d... * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm * https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11325452 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11325452
modderation 6y ago

emersion 6y ago

Use anime character names. That way you have an excuse to collect cute artwork for these machines.

netflixandkill 6y ago
It's easy to be nostalgic for the days of big iron servers or clusters that were around for years as a sort of network landmarks. We used to have dev and QA clusters named after movie monsters and you'd get some great hallway conversations about who was using Godzilla that week. Made for great mascot toys and posters on the rack doors.
- wazoox 6y ago
  A server can be around for years and years why being different. For instance my main debian package server has been "basson" since 2003. In 2003 it was a large, old SGI server; later on it became a 1U rack server, that was replaced a couple of times; nowadays it's a VM. But the internal sources.list still points to "basson" :) (My machines all have musical instrument names).
jjice 6y ago
That's a great scheme. I hope that one day amongst the university computer labs named for Greek/Roman mythology or rock artists, we have a lab of anime characters. At least at my uni, I think a lot of people would get a kick out of that.

walrus01 6y ago

Based on the long response time, I think we've hugged the IETF httpd to death which is somewhat funny considering who runs it.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

We had to solve this problem for our TPU management system: https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus The most sensible naming scheme for us was to distinguish them by index. But there were two important differences: TPUs have many sizes, which means some are larger than others; if you're using a v3-256, you're very likely the only researcher doing so. They are also distinguished by type; v3 is more powerful than v2. Finally, they are region-based; the less powerful v2's are in the US, whereas the v3 fleet is mainly EU based. That led to the convention of tpu-v3-8-euw4a-1, tpu-v2-256-usc1a-0, and so on. The "tpu-" prefix might seem redundant, but I find it's helpful in conversation. That's a personal preference though, and if I had to do it again I'd probably drop the tpu- prefix entirely. I found this scheme was horrible for VMs though. TPUs are often used for specific training runs, and the scheme above is easily added to bash files / config scripts. But for VMs, you're often SSH'ing into them all the time. Ultimately we started naming the VMs after the researchers who originally needed them. Our current primary training box is song.tensorfork.com, named after researcher songpeng who it was created for. So the SSH scheme was pleasant: song@song.tensorfork.com for him, shawn@song.tnesorfork.com for me, arfa@, aydao@, etc. When arfa neded a VM, I simply named it arfa. All other more complicated naming schemes failed with time. No one (including me) could remember long VM names, let alone ones with numbers in them. The other scheme that persisted was to use anime characters, as emersion mentioned. Tensorfork itself runs off of vegeta, which is my personal Hetzner server. "goku" was one of our primary workhorses at one point, due to its large VM size. Our final two VMs are named "test" and "nuck", which also seem to work quite well (much to my surprise). "Is test down?" is almost completely unambiguous. And it's easy to remember which one is which: "nuck" is in Canada, so therefore "test" is the one in europe. A pattern emerges here: most of our VM names are short, four-letter identifiers: arfa, song, test, nuck, goku, with vegeta being the standout. All other conventions failed with time.

ddtaylor 6y ago

Kind of weird when it lists names of killers as a theme name...

sellyme 6y ago
That might cause some problems if you run out of candidates and the sysadmin is trying to come up with an easy solution...

KineticLensman 6y ago

> Certain sets are finite, such as the seven dwarfs. When you order your first seven computers, keep in mind that you will probably get more next year. We ran into this years ago when we named our machines after the Marx Brothers. We started out with Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo. When two more arrived, we used Chico and Gummo. IIRC we added Karl, Deutsche, Skid, Birth and Spencer before giving in and adopting a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't covered by TFA).

yorwba 6y ago
> a proper 'cattle not pets' convention (which, by the way, isn't covered by TFA). It is: ... Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Remember that this was written in 1990. Kubernetes wasn't around back then.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Computer names are like function names. The edge of your system needs good names. The ones in the middle can quite happily be anonymous / referred to only by their address.

mrweasel 6y ago

This kind of naming is fine for small projects, and personal setups. In professional settings I would suggest using descriptive names and rely more on DNS. It's not that I don't enjoy fun and personal naming schemes, it's just that it's a constant annoyance when dealing with a large number of different systems. We've been hired to deal with different companies, who picks some random naming, cars, athletes, plants, cities and so on and it's confusing as hell. How am I suppose to remember that Ford and Volvo are your two web servers? Now I need to maintain a list mappings for your servers and look them up every time I need to change your web configuration. Just call them prod-web01.company.com and prod-web02.company.com, it's fine and everyone will be able to guess what those servers do. You can also do web01.prod.company.com and web01.test.company.com, but while it looks cleaner (and I personally prefer it) is does hide the "prod" or "test" in most shells, so you constantly need to check that you're not messing with a production box.

p_l 6y ago
Functional names for servers are IMHO one of the worst possible options, because functions drift over time. Have individual hw named in unique way that isn't related to functionality it runs, then use CNAMEs specific to functionality - i.e. never point a DNS client at "freddy.dc.somecorp.com", you point it at "dns01.dc.somecorp.com". The decision on what machines need unique names, not just pseudorandom IDs or similar crap, is well described by another comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054487 - which I like to put as "named systems are the systems you care about" In fact, I'll go with seemingly unpopular opinion that there are only pets, never cattle. The pets just happen to have components, but at some level of the stack you're hitting a precious pet. Even if said pet is "us-east-1 Lambda service"
- anarcat 6y ago
  I used to name physical servers like pets (greek gods or whatever) and virtuals like cattle (function), with the idea that, yes, function of physical machines can change over time... But the problem with that logic is that the name is not only attached to the metal, it's set (and mostly so, I'd argue) in software, as the OS hostname. And then what happens next is that the motherboard of that precious pet melts down and you scramble to move those drives to a spare, and now you have two metals with the same name. It just doesn't work so well. And your fancy random or pseudorandom looking naming scheme is cool and fun until someone new comes in and asks you wtf colchicifolium is... Name machines on purpose. If the purpose changes, the OS will likely follow as well. If not, renaming shouldn't be that big of a deal, or, to put it another way: if you can't rename, you can't reinstall, and then you'll fail. Now naming hardware is the "fun" part. when is the last time you did an inventory of your motherboards? or is it disks we're naming? the raid array or individual ones? how about memory sticks? or do you only name precious server cases? ;) after all, that is where the label ends up...

rbanffy 6y ago

Shameless plug: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname It probably needs updating. It's been a while since the last large leak.

cy6erlion 6y ago

Shameless plug, CLI for reading IETF RFCs. https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf https://github.com/cy6erlion/ietf You will read this RFC like this: $ ietf -n 1178

metalliqaz 6y ago
why not just $ ietf 1178 ?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
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majewsky 6y ago
Alternative method for Arch Linux: Install the `rfc` package, then find the RFC at /usr/share/doc/rfc/txt/rfc1178.txt. A very nice package to have installed when travelling far from an internet connection.
- throwaway525142 6y ago
  That unfortunately has an installed size of 500MiB.
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    Perhaps a problem two decades ago but is that really an issue now?

pvinis 6y ago

I've had a nice scheme for naming my devices for a while. I have a list of my devices here, with explanations. https://pvin.is/post/my-device-naming-scheme https://pvin.is/post/my-device-naming-scheme

acomjean 6y ago

Like a lot of things, people can remember names of things better than numbers. Genes for example, it’s easier to remember their names lz, wnt, than their associated gene Id number. But like stars and many other things there are too many to give each a unique name. Naming can make sense, our old cluster was named after orchestra parts. When you logged In you where placed on the lobby. The machines where clustered (violin01, violin02, tuba01) and grouped by function types (percussion were the web servers) New cluster it’s login01,login02 , the work cluster names I don’t remember...

Macha 6y ago
Why is percussion01 better than web01?
- michaelmcdonald 6y ago
  I'm assuming (based on reading how they performed grouping) that percussion01 didn't exist, but perhaps cymbal01 did (since a cymbal is a type of percussion instrument). Therefore cymbal01 would be a web server of sometime. The benefit to naming it this way is you could have multiple types of web servers (internal, dev, prod) and by using a more generic name you could more easily change the function of that web server (so cymbal servers could be dev, then move to prod, without needing a name change).
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    My feeling, though, is that you care more about the function of a machine than the physical machine itself. Why not change the machine name when you change it’s purpose? There is no reason you need to know that the current prod web server used to be the dev server.
cortesoft 6y ago
On the other hand, I really hate code names for software versions... I can never remember which name is which version. I wish everyone would just say “16.04” and “18.04”, that makes it really obvious which version cam before the other one.

curtis3389 6y ago

I use the wordlist from Oren Tirosh’s mnemonic encoding project: http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com/mnemonic/wordlist.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090918202746/http://tothink.com... I can't find the post that linked it, but it had a very nice scheme. EDIT: found it: https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ EDIT2: one-liner to get a random word from the file: cat wordlist.txt | tail -n +2 | sed -E 's/\s*(\w+)\s+/\1\n/g' | sed -E '/^$/d' | shuf -n 1 i.e. <print file> | <skip first line> | <split lines into words> | <remove empty lines> | <choose random line>

anarcat 6y ago
I really like the functional naming part of this, but I don't like the idea of using random names.. I think that server names must be functional otherwise you will tend to think of them as an abstract box that, if you just install that little extra package, will be a fine webserver on top of that mailer. Don't do it! If you're labeling hardware and need multiple functions, use virtualisation or containers, and then the host is named after that (e.g. we use Ganeti, so gnt-01, or say kube-01). At home, I name machines after inspiring political figures and while I like the naming, it does discourage me into treating those machines as cattle, which I should do more.
- anarcat 6y ago
  oh and forgot to mention.. at my current job, there was this practice of naming servers after onions (I'll let you guess where that is). I had no idea how many kinds of onions there were turns out there are many, especially if you start to take in Latin names and translations... But then I need to learn how to spell colchicifolium, and neriniflorum, and no, those two are not related (or are they) and what does meronense do again? and oh yeah corsicum is the replica of one of those... Those naming conventions are cool until you start to document your stuff properly and start being serious about training and including new people. Then you should focus on meaningful, easy to remember, type, and generate, names.
- curtis3389 6y ago
  I prefer to have mostly meaningless names for machines, and then having more names for them in DNS for their various functions. That way the functions can be moved about the machines and if that's what you care about, then that's how you refer to them (deploy the app Foobar to web01 and web02), but when a machine goes down, you can shout, "clark is down!" web01/dns01/sto01 being down only means the service is down, whereas clark being down is something more severe. I manage my stuff with Ansible, which makes all this pretty easy.

thom 6y ago

For personal stuff (and even early machines for some companies which blurred the lines) I always chose the names of forests in the Magic: the Gathering multiverse. I try and help keep this page updated purely for that purpose: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Forest https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Forest These days, for work, it’s just boring unambiguous stuff. I think with more cloud infrastructure and the rarity of shared unix servers with home directories for people, it’s rare that I have any emotional investment in a machine. They’re basically soulless now.

Etheryte 6y ago
To date, Dryad Arbor is still one of the coolest cards in MtG, simply because of both the simplicity and the universality of its quote. When it came out, I was very surprised by the idea that a land could also be a creature. These days we have way wonkier mechanics, but that novelty along with the quote has a special place in my heart.
- thom 6y ago
  Yeah I’m always really sad it doesn’t make it into the MTGO cube.
  - bobbyi_settv 6y ago
    An opponent being able to remove one of your lands with small creature removal or any ping effect or -1/-1 counter is scary. It sees play (I think) in Legacy and Commander where there are a bunch of specific powerful ways to abuse it (e.g., combo off early with Arbor + Gaea's Cradle to generate a bunch of mana), but you're not going to pull that off often in cube, so it would mostly be a basic forest that your opponent can easily remove.

einpoklum 6y ago

Brief summary of the RFC (to save you the read): * Don't overload other terms already in common use. * Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. * Don't use your own name. * Don't use long names. * Avoid alternate spellings. * Avoid domain names. * Avoid domain-like names. * Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names. * Don't use digits at the beginning of the name. * Don't use non-alphanumeric characters in a name. * Don't expect case to be preserved. * Use words/names that are rarely used. * Use theme names. * Use real words. * Don't worry about reusing someone else's hostname. * There is always room for an exception.

jjice 6y ago

For personal machines I use fiction locations from media I enjoy. My laptop is Hyrule, my desktop is Konoha, and my Pi is MotherBase, but I spell mine all lowercase. For servers I use for my roommates and I (Jellyfin and the like), we name them after the quirky students that go to our university that we appreciate.

rphln 6y ago

The naming scheme I settled on for my devices was using ship names from World War 2. - Device size and computing power maps roughly to the ship size: my desktop is named after a battleship, while my Kindle is named after a destroyer. - Servers are always named after carriers. It just made sense to me somehow. - Like the warships, the names can eventually get reused as the devices are replaced.

dls2016 6y ago

I use Simpsons character names for VMs: FatTony, SexyFlanders, Krustofsky... never ending supply of names.

hlehmann 6y ago
I've also always used Simpsons characters for my home machines. So far I've gone through itchy, scratchy, krusty, blinky, moe, and edna.

indentit 6y ago

> Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name. That's a good point, but humans are very different to computers - machines (be they physical or virtual) are provisioned for a specific purpose (even if that is to be "Fred's PC"), whereas humans need time to grow and can decide for themselves what to do as a career / what their hobbies will be, and change it any time. But realistically, yes, the RFC is right that you may end up with machines whose purpose changes or multiple machines have the same purpose etc. But when they don't, it is much easier to have meaningful names. If you will name them differently, then please make sure all developers can access the list/mapping document and it is kept updated. It's frustrating if you want to investigate some production problems but end up looking at the wrong server's logs because devops didn't tell anyone they moved an application /website etc. I like someone else's comment about app01 being easier to reason about and recreate than something named more specifically, and in the modern world, its easy to spin up a new docker instance or VM so there's less need to "let's just add this small service on that machine because it has spare capacity" (where capacity could be CPU/RAM etc.)

mercora 6y ago

for virtual machines i tend to use names that belong to some other entity and call the hypervisor after that. for example Saturn and its moons, Africa and its countries or some authors and their works.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Or your robot vacuum cleaner! My nieces have various names - Oni, Bob. Ours is named Puck.

tyingq 6y ago

Resource tags, like the ones supported by Vmware, AWS, and other cloud providers would be more important to me than a server name. I suppose for old-school bare-metal on-prem, you could put tags in DNS TXT records and some database.

intrasight 6y ago

I am fondly recollecting my time as an undergraduate at CMU in the 80s. All the machines were named from cities and towns in Pennsylvania. Old-school bare-metal on-prem indeed. That time has largely passed as machines are ephemeral. Functional names make more sense now.

bombcar 6y ago

Given that it seems you don’t upgrade Linux Instalaciones between major revisions - I use short names that are unique in the first character or two and code the os/version. Sure it doesn’t scale much but I don’t have many servers and ssh u<tab> gets me where I need to be.

IgorPartola 6y ago

I use Harry Potter character names. There were hundreds of the mentioned off hand in the books, so I usually use obscure ones. They have the benefit of being easy to pronounce and spell: Mafalda Hopkirk, Silvanus Kettleburn, Irma Pince, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harry_Potter_charact...

RegW 6y ago
All devices in our house are creatures: griphook, fawkes, crookshanks, pigwidgeon, hedwig, aragog, firenze, grawp, etc.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Nice! I usually do creatures for more appliance-type devices and wizards for servers. But it is somewhat of an arbitrary division.

moonbug 6y ago

what's tomorrow, a thread on last night's dreams? No one cares how you name your computers.

ylor 6y ago
I care. I have my own silly naming convention and I like hearing about other's. It's a fun topic.

jlgaddis 6y ago

At the risk of showing my age... In my own private home lab -- which has grown way too large -- I like using names of the Garbage Pail Kids [0] as hostnames. There's a few benefits to this naming scheme, when dealing with physical machines at least: 1) you can usually find a name that suits the "temperament" of the particular host and 2) you can tape the trading card to the host (or the rack, next to it) to make finding / identifying it easier. -- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Pail_Kids

Nvorzula 6y ago

Some time ago I got into the habit of naming my home network after Pokemon that I happen to thought fit well. My Windows desktop is Charizard and it's Ubuntu dual boot is DarkCharizard. My fileserver/Docker box is Metagross. My wireless SSID is Raichu, my laptop is Pikachu, and my phone is Pichu. And so on.

shagie 6y ago

One company that I worked at... while the hardware people had their boring "r17s4ad" type name (rack 17, shelf 4, application, development), our team used the naming scheme of Caribbean islands. This worked rather well. Unfortunately, I only remember the test and production server names. The test systems were "Trinidad" and "Tobago". The production systems where "Nevis" and "Nassau" (the app started with an 'N'). The thing that made this work really well was that the first syllable hinted on what the rest of the word would be and then everything beyond that reinforced that you read it right. This even was the case that foreign accents, while slightly off still reinforced the "you heard this right". The machines _also_ had names of "test01" and "test02" or similar... but we (as devs) never used those names because you had to listen to the end of it to be sure that you had the right machines.

krallja 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_fig... has been good for naming my workstations for decades. Dual-boot scenaria can use Roman/Greek names for the Mac/Windows or Win/Linux “personalities” of the same physical machine.

rgj 6y ago
I once almost got fired because my computer was called aphrodite, the CTO had to demo my webapp, and he couldn’t spell it correctly.

lamontcg 6y ago

Over 5 years at working at Amazon (quite some time ago, I don't know what they do now) and we happily violated "no domain names" without any issue for linux servers. If you don't have linux boxes that span different networks it doesn't cause a problem to have server have one single domain name and have the hostname be the same. Linux boxes aren't proper security devices or router so don't use them as that and don't mutihome them. The routers and switches were given short names. These RFCs simply don't capture that there are rules you can adopt (and if you're big enough -- which is not terribly big) then you can discard some of these suggestions completely. There is not a one-size-fits-all. I ignored this RFC's suggestion at a fairly massive scale for 5 years and never had an issue. Also don't fall into the trap of just assigning random serial numbers to servers. I later worked somewhere that did this and it makes it difficult to communicate about the servers in the middle of outages. I've had communication issues where I've been talking to another engineer and I was using the first hex digits of the server name and they were using the last as shortcuts and we thought we were logged into different servers and it was the same one. You hardly ever want humans dealing with your server names, but when humans do need to use your server names it is one of the times that really matter because shit is on fire. Group them by single purpose of what the cluster does with some kind of incrementing number. The idea to use theme names and not "project" names is also deeply 100% wrong. When you have 100,000s of servers you run out of theme names and you'll fail to remember the name schemes in the middle of an outage. Name them after what the servers do, and keep them more or less reflecting their purpose. Consider carefully some kind of numbering scheme to keep the short names unique across datacenters so you don't have a dozen foo-101 servers. You may want to use incrementing serial numbers for both datacenters and cluster members or something so "foo-1-101" and number your datacenters (or logical cluster number if you're really big and stamp them out 30,000 at a time or something). Oh right this is the RFC from 1990. Yeah, shit has changed, this RFC needs to evolve. Back in 1990 when this was written a single system admin hand managing 20-30 servers was a lot. Web didn't exist. I can't recall any kind of load balancing or much clustering. You might have SunOS boxes running RIP doing routing across internal subnets that were 10baseT. NAT and firewalls weren't used much at all and servers would just sit on public IPs. This RFC is prehistoric.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

rgj 6y ago

Best naming scheme I ever saw was at Harbinger in the late nineties. They used the periodic system. The last octet of the IP address corresponded to the atomic number, and you could use the full element name, or the abbreviation. So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera.

malobre 6y ago
It's funny it is exactly what I did on my LAN, Hydrogen being my router and so on.
jlgaddis 6y ago
What was the plan if they needed another subnet?
- Agenttin 6y ago
  There are only 118 elements. Obviously this is only for small groups of servers.
koolba 6y ago
When you split a workload from one to multiple machines, would it have to follow the rules of fission to decide where to run it?
zoomablemind 6y ago
> So carbon.harbinger.com was x.x.x.6 and c.harbinger.com was a CNAME to carbon. oxygen or o was .8 etcetera. No wonder helium was mostly hanging ... Sorry, could not resist. It is a clever naming scheme. At one site a client used names from The Three Stooges, then they got the 6th server (exhausting the list of the lead characters).
- watersb 6y ago
  We had Stooges servers in the 1990s...

dehrmann 6y ago

On thing I've seen work well for corporate networks is use a different domain for infra than for public-facing servers.

hoppla 6y ago

For some reason, when doing a fresh OS install, the hostname step is the bottleneck and takes too long to complete. Distros should really prioritize optimizing this part of the installer!

chewxy 6y ago

I have named my machines after Doctor Who planets for the last 18 ish years. All new machines start as Gallifrey (workstation) or TARDIS (laptop). Then as they stop being my primary devices they get other planet / ship names. The torrenting machine was suitably called Skaro. :p Two exceptions are my PiHole and OctoPi. The old PiHole used to be called TimeLock but when I upgraded I didn't keep the name

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Just reminded me how Sword of the Stars 1 uses a bunch of scifi references for the names of their "neutral" or Human randomly generated stars : http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Sci-fi_References#Star_Names http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Sci-fi_References#Star...

pawelmi 6y ago

Two hardest problems in IT: naming, cache invalidation and off by one.

diftraku 6y ago

A long-time personal favourite naming scheme of mine has been Pokemons (and by extension, Digimons). There's a good selection, it's pretty varied and there's no shortage of em (assuming you don't exceed 100-200 new systems in a 3 year period). This also has an accidental side-benefit of not being tasked to name new hosts at work, unless your really want to call the new database server Stufful, for example. Another thing to keep in mind with more descriptive hostnames like `database`, is to serialize them from the start. It's a very minor thing but after you have three hosts with one of them missing the serialization, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb and it could be a major undertaking on changing that name where it's used. When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned).

MauranKilom 6y ago
> When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned). Or, as told by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/910/ https://xkcd.com/910/

hyperrail 6y ago

The weirdest naming scheme for computers I've seen is the one used some years ago by my college: It named Linux workstations after Linux kernel committers' email usernames! There were the better-known folks like linus (Linus Torvalds [1]) and gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman [2]), but also relatively more obscure people, like shemminger (Stephen Hemminger [3]) and stelian (Stelian Pop [4]). I didn't recognize most of those names at the time, but now that I do, I wonder what those people would have thought about having a large organization's computers named after them. A bit creeped out, I would think. [1] https://github.com/torvalds https://github.com/torvalds [2] http://www.kroah.com/log/ http://www.kroah.com/log/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/ [4] https://www.popies.net https://www.popies.net

gbolcer 6y ago

AT UCI, they chose Paris Metro stops. All of them were hard to spell and pronounce, so we always made up shortened aliases.